Friday Reads: The Halloween Edition

When Bugs Go Bad—Really Bad. Talk about uncomfortable relationships: Scientific American brings us up close and personal with several hair-raising tales of parasites in the animal kingdom, including a flatworm that multiplies inside snails. Once the worms are ready to trade up on a host:

"[They] push up into the snail's tentacles, making them swell and squirm, mimicking the action of bugs that birds like to eat. As the snail crawls, blindly, into the sunlight, a passing bird is likely to swoop down to snatch a tasty tentacle or two."

The worms return to terra firma to infect other unsuspecting gastropods courtesy of bird droppings.

Lest you think we are safe from any persuasions of this sort, think again:

The chemical changes brought on by the parasite [Toxoplasma gondii] appear to have some of the same effects on humans, who can be infected by ingesting parasite eggs from cat feces. Research by Kevin Lafferty, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, has found that the parasite can cause women to act more moralistically, and men less so.

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